Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

Most of her life was spent in silence; there were many moments when she found living—difficult. Tedious. On the worst days, fatuous.

But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.

Love had broken her life into two separate halves: the half before she had fallen, and the half afterward.

The House had never had the tech, nor the understanding, nor the on-duty flesh magicians to work a vat womb.

she knew he considered her with an awful respect, the same type one might have for a hereditary cancer that one knew was on its way.

At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples—and with incontrovertible suggestions that Harrowhark really ought to marry this son of the Second, or this daughter of the Fifth—and she could have watched coloured banners get strung up next to the black skull of the Black Anchorite. And that would be the end of the Ninth House, even more completely than a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine.

Even with that readiness, she had committed the indelible sin halfway; she had gathered up the matter of Ortus Nigenad’s soul and not been able to choke him all the way down.

There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.

YOU STILL PRIDED YOURSELF on three things: firstly, bloody-minded composure; secondly, an inhuman intellect for necromancy; thirdly, being very difficult to kill.

the eyes were a curious muddle of colours: washed-out purple jostled for space with a milky blue, freckled here and there with a lightish, hazy brown.

She also possessed two arms, which was one more than you’d last seen her sporting.

she looked at you now with a soft and thoroughly uncharacteristic hunger.

Ianthe Tridentarius was a black hole where no heart could be sensed beating and no brain could be seen sparking. The brain, you knew grudgingly, existed. The heart was an open question.

She looked at your face—saw, most likely, her own death reflected in your expression

“Tell me how you came to have what you are holding,” you croaked. “You put it in my own hands, you skull-faced fruitcake,” she said soothingly.

The letter was written in Ninth House crypt-script; your own cipher, based off that of your parents and developed when you were seven years old. It was unbreakable to anyone who lacked your rosary, Marshal Crux, and a hundred or so years to spare.

ADDRESSING THE REVEREND LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, WRITING AS THE SAME, NOW DEAD.

As I write, it has been forty-eight hours since you became a Lyctor at Canaan House. By the time you read this you will not recall the writing thereof, as the Harrowhark of the writing will be dead and gone. Her resurrection constitutes a fail state and must be avoided at all costs.

GUIDELINE #3: THE SWORD WILL REMAIN ON YOU AT ALL TIMES. Wipe it down with your arterial blood nightly. Coat the blade in the ash which regrows. Do not cut flesh with the naked blade. Do not cut bone with the naked blade. Even this may not prove enough. Treat the sword as your promised death, and act according to the first guideline.

I will confirm your access to the Lyctoral well. This battery is, most likely, the extent of your capability.

YOU OWE IANTHE TRIDENTARIUS THE FAVOUR OF THE CHAIN. This will be difficult to justify. I will therefore not justify it. Tridentarius has made what has come to pass possible. I owe her a debt that you will undoubtedly be paying for the rest of your life. The agreement does end on your death. The agreement does extend into the House, but NOT into the Tomb.

It goes without saying that Ianthe will destroy you if she can. She has helped me ably, but it has cost her nothing and you everything. I have guarded from her full understanding of the work so that she cannot undo it on a whim or by accident. You are in her power. I am in no doubt of her misusing it. You yourself never had power over anyone else but you misused it violently.

I have left other instructions in case of new circumstances. Ianthe holds twenty-four of these letters and will give you twenty-two, including this one.

understand that I envy you more than I have ever envied anyone, and that I look upon your birth as a blessing. Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes. Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No.

If you suspect either jaw or tongue has been replaced, DO NOT SWEAR THE OATH. Instead kill her immediately.

In the hope of a future forgiveness, I remained, HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS

by the ripped and remade soul of Ortus Nigenad.” “Who?” she said. “Oh, yes—the cavalier.”

“Well,” she said eventually, “that constitutes some improvement over your sewing my lips shut, like you did the … no, pardon me, I agreed not to mention incidental detail.” “Wait. You submitted to be made a Sewn Tongue?”

“I gave you something you cared about very deeply at the time,” she said, idly swinging one leg to perch over one knee. “I don’t consider my price all that high … and neither did you.

right arm still strangely flopsome

you are now pledged to me and by extension to Coronabeth, and I tell you for free that one of the riders is that you will never harm a hair on my sister’s head.” “Your sister is likely no longer alive,” you said, seeing no reason not to say it. She threw back her pale head and laughed outright. “Corona!” she said, when she was done. “My sweet baby Corona is far too stupid to die—she’d walk backward out of the River swearing blind she was going in the right direction. I will tell you when my sister is dead, thank you, Harrowhark—and that day is not today.”

You could follow any blind precept, if the alternative was madness.

“Take your time,” she said. “I would have thought time was the last thing we had at the moment … but who am I to judge the King Undying, the God of the Nine Houses?” You said, because again you could see no reason not to: “You should have disciplined Tern better, if he’s still fighting you this way.”

For the first time, when you looked at her, Ianthe gleamed with thanergy as a coal gleamed red with heat.

blood sprayed promiscuously against your face,

Your eyes rolled back in your head in an ecstasy of suffering.

you were being punished both, perhaps, for the kiss, and for something you could not even recall doing.

“I don’t care about Babs … Just don’t suggest my sister is dead to me, ever again.”

From space, the House of the First resembled a box of tumbled jewels. Haloed in white, its blues deep and brilliant and oxidised, a planet of water, close enough to the fiery gyre of Dominicus that the water was not allowed to freeze yet nor so close that it burnt away. Insubstantial and ever-shifting ocean, as far as the reddened eye could see. Her smarting eyes fell upon a tiny jumble of squares, ringed around a central greyish smudge.

“The insanity,” said her companion. Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. He mistook her rising relief for an emotion he ought to have known she never felt. Ortus said, distracted: “The only surprise really being in it expressing this way, rather than … No, I am not surprised, Lady Harrowhark. Perhaps you may yet have cause to find it useful.” “Useful.”

“I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”

Ortus primly said he thought that nobody who read the Noniad would be the sort of churl who misread a simple and evocative collocation like bone frenzy; he went on to suggest that such a person probably didn’t even read in the first place, and would be more inclined to trifle with prurient magazines or pamphlets than to bother themselves with a complex epic such as the Noniad; he said that he wouldn’t want such a person to read his poetry anyway.

Ortus would be a good rest cure, should the homesickness get too acute. He had classical Ninth eyes: a tintless shade very close to true black, sharply ringed around the iris, very like her own.

“What do you think it is like—to be a Lyctor? Do you think it is a central tragedy to them, their great age, their timelessness?” She was surprised again. “Nigenad, what would be the tragedy in living for a myriad? Ten thousand years to learn everything there is to know—to read everything that has ever been written … to study without fear of premature end or reckoning. What is the tragedy of time?” “Time can render one impotent beyond meaning,” said Ortus unexpectedly. He made his eyes downcast again, and said: “I would not expect you to—be crushed by the weight of that particular comprehension, Reverend Daughter.” He might as well have said, You are a baby of seventeen, and I am an adult of thirty-five.

Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you—Oh, your cavaliers are y...

“Nigenad,” she said, “I am what I am, and I am seventeen. Yet I assure you that I contain multitudes.”

THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME

Your clinical brain rose to the fore as your meat brain shied and ran around and barked like the badly behaved animal it was.

Am I no longer Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second saint to serve the King Undying? Have I lost my rank among the Four—or, now, as I so horribly find, the Three? Am I not the last sister serving in a charnel house of dead sisters, all of whom gave their long and dutiful lives so that your squalling children and their germ-ridden children’s children’s children could bask in the light of Dominicus?”

Lyctors kept their own faces, but the eyes they stole from someone else.